


texas funeral

by swingingparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:20:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26007907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swingingparty/pseuds/swingingparty
Summary: Maybe it was the lack of his shades, the lack of his stupid beat-up baseball cap, the lack of the permanent frown etched into his face every waking moment of the day, but you’d always be hit with some weird, intangible feeling in the center of your chest, the sudden realization that, when he was out cold like this, he looked small.Young. Fragile, almost.Human.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 4
Kudos: 71





	texas funeral

**Author's Note:**

> hi hello hi cw for implied child abuse incase u missed the tagz <3 stay safe! title is from a song of the same name by hop along

“I killed my luaus, you know.” 

You’re sitting on the foot of your bed, knees pulled to your chest, methodically making your way through an alchemized knock-off granola bar cradled in front of you. Across from you, Karkat sits up against the headboard. His book is still cradled in his lap, fingertip marking the last sentence he was on, but he’s looking up, somewhere vaguely over your shoulder. His gaze is glassy, unfocused, like he’s watching something only he can see, and you have to resist the stupid urge to turn around and try to see it, too. 

Instead, you just pick at the corner of the granola bar, watching as it crumbles into your open palm, and give a little affirmative hum under your breath. Karkat has a look on his face that tells you he’s only half in the room with you right now—you never really know where the other hand goes until he comes right out and tells you, and sometimes that process can take upwards of days, especially when it’s something the troll really, really doesn’t want to think about—but it’s still worth it to participate where you can anyways. 

“I ran the code,” he says, blinking slowly. He looks like he’s trying to wake up from a dream but can’t fully manage to open his eyes. “Killed everyone’s lusus, really. Not just mine.” He frowns, brows smashing together all of a sudden. “At least, I think it did.” 

You uncurl a little, stretching your legs out until your feet rest against Karkat’s shins. He feels warm through your socks, body running a few degrees higher than average human’s. You feel him shift against the touch a little, silently deciding whether it’s one of those days or not, before setting the book aside and folding his hands in his lap, staring down at him.

“Think or know?” you ask, and set your granola bar aside, too. It crumbles some more as it hits the bedsheets. 

Karkat turns his palms over, studying them like they’re some sort of priceless artifact he’s just dug out of the ground after a billion and one years of searching for. His gaze is still distant; he’s still seeing more than just his hands in front of him. 

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve killed a lot of people,” he says, and there’s something about the clench to his voice that makes your heart hollow out for a second. “I’ve killed a lot of fucking people.” 

“That wasn’t you.” 

“I let it happen.” 

You slide across the bed to him, sitting so your knees press together. After a second, he kind of slumps forward, forehead bumping against your collar bone. His breath is faint against the crook of your neck. You watch his hands twist in his lap. 

“That wasn’t you,” you say again. You press your cheek against the side of his head, feel his hair tickle your eyelashes every time you blink. “You did everything you could to save everyone.” 

“It wasn’t enough.”

Karkat sounds tired and miserable. You can’t think of a nice way to tell him that sometimes that’s going to happen: you’re going to try and try and try to save everyone you can and it’s still not going to be enough; people are always going to die all around you because that’s just how the game worked, because that’s just how life works in general, and you're about to just say it like it is, but then you remember that if there’s anyone who needs this message imparted upon them, it sure as hell isn’t Karkat fucking Vantas. 

So you just keep quiet, press your face into his hair some more, and close your eyes.

***

When you were twelve years old, you had this recurring dream almost every night for six months straight.

It always started off the same: things would shift into focus with you standing in the center of your bedroom. The curtains were always half-opened, pools of orange sunlight spilling across your floor as the sun sets outside your window. 

In your hand, there was always a bat—one of those beat-up wooden ones you always remember seeing the kids who lived in the lot next to your apartment complex playing baseball with. You can still remember all the tiny details about it: blueish-grey striping along the side the had started to peel off with age in some places, the dents and chips at the head of it, the leather grip with fraying strings trailing down from it like little tassels.

It had always weirded you out, that you had a bat. Out of all the assorted weaponry scattered around your apartment, out of all the shitty swords and ninja stars, you don’t really ever recall seeing a baseball bat. You had thought about procuring one, sure; you always figured you could just steal your neighbors’ one, or take one from the sports equipment bin at the rec center you used to hang around at when the security guard’s back was turned. But that plan had never been executed, mostly because you were almost certain that if you did something like bring a fucking _bat_ home to try and use in strifes against your bro, or even to just put under your bed for safekeeping, you would’ve gotten your ass handed to you on a cheap paper plate in record timing. And not without good reason, really. The fuck was a smoothed-out stick of wood ever going to do against the katana your bro spent more time sharpening than he ever did holding conversations with you? 

But regardless of how bizarre it had always felt, in the dream, you had a baseball bat. You would always be white-knuckling it, holding onto the thin end of it like your life depended on it and then some, and your grip wouldn’t slacken in the slightest as you crossed your room and pushed your door open.

The thing would creak. It creaked in real life, and you sometimes thought that it was a purposeful design flaw, something done just so your bro would always know where you were, always know when best to intercept you. 

But unlike real life, the house would be dead silent as you stepped out onto the landing in front of your bedroom. There was no sound of the TV blaring, no video game noises, no fingers clacking against a keyboard as your bro stood at the kitchen counter, banging away at his computer as he edited his most recent smuppet video. It would always be quiet as the fucking grave, so quiet that you’d be able to hear the sound of your grip shifting on the bat, hear the sound of your feet sliding against the carpet as you walked out of your room and down the landing, hear your own breath rasping in the back of your throat. 

You would make a beeline to your bro’s room. It was down the hall, the last door on the left, right across from the bathroom and right next to his weird pseudo-office that he once broke your nose for trying to get a peek inside when you were eight. 

The thing never healed right, and you sometimes still can’t breathe when you lay on your left side for too long. In the dream, though, you wouldn’t be thinking about that as you crept down the hallway; the only conscious thought you remember having on your mind—well, as conscious as you could get in these semi-lucid dream states, at least—was that you had to get to your bro’s room, and you had to get there fast.

You were never sure why, and it wouldn’t hit you at any point, not even as you made it to the threshold and slowly cracked his door open, your palm splayed out on the wood paneling in front of you; you’d position your hand below the knot in the wood you always thought looked like the storm on Jupiter each time like clockwork, a little ritual your dream self kept up for no apparent reason. As you pushed the door open and stepped inside his room, the sound of his heavy, irregular snoring filling your ears at once, you knew that was the point in which you should start panicking. Logically speaking, you knew there was a reason you had tried to snoop around in his office and not his actual bedroom itself: the fact that he would probably beat your ass into another century if he caught you, rewriting the definition of no holds barred with every blow he landed. Logically speaking, you knew that the second he woke up and saw you there, you’d be dead meat. 

And yet you were never scared, not even a little. You just gripped the bat tighter and made your way over to stand at the side of his bed, hovering over his sleeping figure. You’d look down at the bat, and then you’d look over at him, back and forth between the two for a minute. Maybe it was the lack of his shades, the lack of his stupid beat-up baseball cap, the lack of the permanent frown etched into his face every waking moment of the day, but you’d always be hit with some weird, intangible feeling in the center of your chest, the sudden realization that, when he was out cold like this, he looked small. 

Young. Fragile, almost. 

Human. Painfully fucking human. 

Then you would raise the bat above your head, every muscle in your body gearing to bring it smashing down onto his face. You’d always wake up before you did anything. You could never tell if this was a disappointment or a relief, and you still can’t tell now. 

You think you might want to keep it that way.

***

You weren’t mad when Jack killed your bro. 

You weren’t mad, and you weren’t particularly sad about it, either. If anything, the only feeling that slammed into you the second you came into that clearing and saw him lying there, spread-eagled, neck jerked to one side at too awkward an angle to be medically healthy in any respect, was pure, undulating shock. 

In every single fight the two of you had, he had wiped the roof deck with your sorry ass. The only times you managed to overpower him were when he either wasn’t paying enough attention, or he didn’t care enough to stop you. Even then, the times you did manage to get the upper hand were always on his terms, always because he chose to let you get the last punch in, so it’s probably a fair thing to say that he never lost to you. 

He just let you win sometimes, and those aren’t the same thing, not at all. 

So it wasn’t hard for you to start assuming that he was indestructible, in a way; at the very least, you always figured he’d be able to hold his own in any fight he got into, or be able to fight his ass out of a situation if things looked like they were going to go too far south for him to handle. You thought he was strong enough to do that, and you thought he was smart enough to, as well.

You don’t think it was ever a question of immortality. The recent knowledge of weird time shenanigans and ecto-bullshit that’s been vested upon you aside, you had always grown up with the understanding that your bro was human, as human as you were, as human as anyone else was. Batshit up the fucking belfry, sure, but no less human, no less impermanent. Of course he could die. You weren't a fucking idiot; you knew that. Really, you think the question came down to subverting expectations. In your head, there was only ever one course your life could take: him taking it too far one day, and you getting your ass killed. In your head, you were always going to be the kid who died at sixteen in some embarrassingly unceremonious way like getting kicked down a flight of stairs, and he was always going to be the guy to carry on. 

And yet he died. Jack killed him, easy as that. There he was, hole in his stomach, blood beading at the corners of his lips, eyes open wide behind the cracked shades, totally and irreparably and irre-fucking-versibly dead. 

You can conjure up every single detail from your memory of seeing him. You can recreate every crease in his shirt, every tuft of grass growing between the cracks in the rock he lay on, every drop of blood pooling from his body until you have one giant mental tapestry of the scene that’s so vivid you feel like you’re reliving the experience. Sometimes you really _do_ relive the experience in dreams; the moments of walking up to the body, still doubting that it was really him, that he was really dead even as you started to reign yourself to the concept more and more, play out on loop at the forefront of your mind the second you close your eyes some nights. You can live the experience over a million times, and then you can relive it a million more just for good measure. Just for the hell of it.

But you don’t feel sad. You couldn’t make yourself feel sad even if you wanted to. 

Even though you do. 

***

You break swords when you spar.

It becomes a habit you can’t kick. First to quell the boredom—really, there are only so many times to can watch _Love, Actually_ in a week before even you start to feel like you're going insane—and then to quell the weird, itchy feeling that picks up in the center of your chest when you find yourself with too much time on your hands and not enough to keep your trains of thought from running off the rails entirely. 

So you alchemize swords, and you alchemize practice dummies, and you spent hours upon hours every day faux-sparring with them until your head is pounding and your hands are raw and the swords have snapped clean in half from overuse and Karkat or Rose or Kanaya has to march up to the observation deck you’ve commandeered and turned into a training ring and drag you down to your room to get some sleep.

“Do you think this is healthy?” Rose asks you one day over dinner. Your sparring equipment is on the table beside you, towel and water bottle and recently broken sword all piled into a heap, its presence so dominating you somehow feel as if it’s creating a gravitational pull in the space-time continuum around it. Rose has been shooting the thing filthy glares throughout the whole of the meal like it’s done some sort of grand injustice to her, 

“I think I’d be bored as shit without it,” you say as a means of response. It doesn’t even come close to answering her question, and you know that’s going to piss her off. 

“Dave.” The bite to her voice is apparent. Sometimes she's so predictable it hurts.

“Rose,” you fire back, because you’re tired and sore and sweaty and the only thing you really want to think about right now is moving your fork from your plate to your mouth in as quick succession as possible. 

She exhales loudly through her nose as she stands, scraping her plate and cup up and carrying it to the kitchen. There’s the clang of ceramic on metal as she sets it down in the sink. You watch over the rims of your glasses as she pauses there for a moment, lips pressed together into a thin, severe line.

It’s funny how old she looks sometimes, how many years past fourteen. 

“You’re running away,” she says. Her tone isn’t harsh, exactly, but it’s flat with a heavy sort of conviction that somehow hurts a million times more. 

“Says you,” you snap back. Hitting where it hurts.

But she just shakes her head, loose coils of hair falling into her eyes. “I can’t—”

“Can’t what?”

It’s a genuine question on your end but Rose just sighs again, this one somehow more defeated than the last and, yeah, you know what, you probably deserve that one.

“Turn the lights off when you leave,” she says. 

And then she turns on her heel and leaves, footsteps fading as she heads down the hall back to her room, leaving you and the broken sword to sit there in silence. 

***

You’re on your third practice dummy and fifth sword when Karkat comes up to the observation deck, towel in one hand, bottles of water in the other. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he says emphatically as he pulls to a stop behind you. You’re buried hilt deep in one of the dummy’s stomach, little bits of fiber and cotton spilling out around you, chest rising and falling with the effort. It takes you a second to fully focus on him standing behind you. 

You leave the sword where it is, surrendering yourself to either a vicious tug-of-war match with the dummy’s desecrated corpse later on or just alchemizing another set of swords tomorrow, and turn to face Karkat. He holds the towel out for you; you accept it with a grunt.

“What’s the body count now?” he asks, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Five fucking billion and twelve?”

You exhale into the towel. It smells cold and dusty. “Huh?”

“The dummies, idiot.”

You spare a look at the one you just finished with, now awkwardly slumped forward, propped up by the hilt of the sword. There’s something about looking at it that makes you feel a little nauseous, but that’s probably just the dehydration talking. 

You hold out a hand and Karkat passes one of the water bottles to you. “What about them?”

“You’ve been running those stupid things through non-stop for, like, a pedigree straight.”

Another side-eye to the dummy. “Yeah. And?”

Karkat gives you a look. A Look, really, capital L and all, and you have a feeling that you’re supposed to know what it means. “Generally speaking, when people go around brutally massacring practice dummies—”

“I’m not _brutally massacring_ anything, dude; they aren’t even fucking _alive_ —”

“—it means something’s wrong with them. In the head.” He arches an eyebrow at you. “Significantly.”

“Thanks.” You unscrew the cap of the water bottle and knock back a mouthful, wiping your face with the back of your hand. “Always know what to say to say to get those butterflies in me all fired up again.”

Karkat just snorts, reaching to pull the towel back from where you’d slung it across your shoulder. He starts to fiddle with it, folding and unfolding it in his hands, staring up at you unblinkingly while you chug some more of the water. After a few moments of silence, the back of your neck starts to itch in the way it always does when someone watches you for too long, and you throw a glare over at him,

“Dude,” you say.

He returns it with full force. “What?”

“Stop looking at me like that.”

Karkat huffs. “Like what?”

“Like—” You wave the bottle in his general direction, some of the water splashing out over the rim and onto the concrete below. For a second you swear it sizzles, and it takes you a second to keep yourself from being catapulted back to the roofdeck and the tarmac and the sound of metal on metal on skin. “—that. You know. All concerned, and shit.”

“I’m not concerned,” he says, glare going a shade more baleful.

“You are so concerned.”

“I’m _not_.”

“You’re spending too much time with Kanaya.” A funny taste starts to build in the back of your mouth; you wash it down with another gulp of water. It tastes tinny and cold and a little fake, somehow. “Give it another month and you’ll start carrying a chainsaw around and draining a pint of blood from Rose every other week.”

Karkat huffs again, the sound low in the back of his throat. You watch him watch you for a while, before he silently breaks the unofficial staring match to look down at his boots, scuffing the ground with them a little.

“Maybe I am,” he mutters.

“What, drinking Rose’s blood?”

“No, idiot.” He shoots you a look through the hair falling into his eyes. “Concerned about you.”

You wonder, a little dully, if it’s normal, always feeling like you’re walking into a trap when conversations like these start. It doesn't take a genius to determine that Karkat is nothing even remotely resembling awful or cruel or even a little unkind; he’d be the last person to mock you, to belittle you, to do anything bad to you, even if you did something completely crazy and also embarrassing as all-fuck like talk to him about whatever’s on your mind. Out of anyone you know, anyone you’ll ever know, you can talk to him. You know this.

And yet just the very thought of it feels like a door slamming at the top of a flight of stars, a broken light flickering out on the inside of a fridge, a camera light flashing at you as you raid the medicine cabinet in your bathroom for painkillers. It feels like a million metaphors, a million thoughts and pictures and images you still don’t know how to make sense of—don’t even know where to _start_ doing so—and sometimes you can’t help but feel like it’d be easier if you just didn’t start all of that. 

With him, with anyone, with yourself.

There’s also the issue that you don’t even know if there _is_ anything wrong. Most of the time it’s nothing tangible, no definitive problem you can work your way through—or gripe to Karkat about if it’s simple and digestible and not-totally-fucked-up enough to do so—, nothing more than a feeling. A haze on the edge of your vision. A rock sitting on your chest every time you close your eyes to sleep.

A shadow in the corner of your room, a pair of ice-blue glass eyes staring at you through the darkness, a lit firecracker in the fridge, a sword on your pulse point, a—

“Dunno why you would be.” You shrug. The muscles in your neck feel tight. “I’m all good, dude.”

The look Karkat gives you is so wholly unbelieving your stomach aches for a second. “You don’t have to be, you know.”

You wonder, even more dully, if there will ever be a point at which you believe that. You’re not sure if you like the answer your brain offers up, so you stop thinking about it altogether. As much as you can, at least.

“I know.”

***

You don’t remember your first strife.

It’s funny, because when you think back to your childhood, back to the years you spent suffocating half to death in your tiny corner of Texas, the strifes are the only things that feel important, as shitty as it sounds. It’s not like there wasn’t other stuff—good stuff, too—because there was, and you cling to that shit so tight you feel like you’re going to break your hands sometimes. But when you look back to what stuck—what still sticks, more than you want it to, really, but that’s sort of a moot point—it always comes back to the strifes.

And yet you can’t remember the first one. You can’t even remember around when the first one took place. There was no come-to-Jesus moment, no light switch flip, no monumental shift between your life being relatively well-adjusted to whatever the fuck it was by the time you turned thirteen. Your whole relationship with your bro was strifes—hell, your whole fucking _life_ was comprised of them, the periods in which you weren’t getting your ass beat into the pavement more interim spaces than anything else. 

As far as you can tell, you might’ve just been born this way. Born to live this way, at least.

Wouldn’t that just be fucking poetic.

***

Karkat doesn’t spar with you anymore, but he’ll still come up to the observation deck to keep you company slash babysit you, whatever kind of day it is for him. Sometimes he brings his books. Sometimes he brings his husktop and spends the whole time banging away on the keyboard, muttering under his breath. Sometimes he just sits there, knees pulled to his chest, arms wrapped around his shins, and watches you.

Today he’s doing the latter. You can feel his gaze burning a hole through the back of your neck as you have at it with yet another practice dummy, blade slicing through the air with faint hissing sounds, the slap of metal on fiber echoing around the space at regular intervals. Sweat beads on your brow, dripping down the sides of your face, stinging your eyes. It’s never hot on the meteor—you’re pretty sure deep space can’t even get _warm_ , never mind hot enough to work up a sweat doing anything—but you always find yourself slipping between dimensions, between universe, between homes when you spar. You always find your grip on the reality you've tried to cement yourself in weakening, so much so that you feel the images around you start to blur until they take the shape of Houston.

If Rose was here, she would say that the brain’s ability to convince itself of things that are not there—such as the Texas sun on the back of your neck, the hundred-degree heat, the heavy, sticky air filling your lungs every time you suck a breath in—a suitably self-impressed smile covering up any hint of genuineness to her words. However, it’s Karkat, not her, watching you right now, and when you finally pause, turning to face him, chest heaving, the only expression on his face is one of tight, tense concern.

You’re getting a little sick of looks like that, you think. Just a little.

“‘Sup?” you say.

Karkat tips his head to the side, brow furrowing. “How’s the sword?” he asks. 

You get the feeling that wasn’t what he wanted to ask at all, but decide it’s in your own best interest to let it slide. 

“Alright,” you say, giving it an experimental bend, the point pressing into the ground. It feels tenuous but still enough to be usable. Another few rounds and it’ll probably snap with wear, but you’re not super bothered by that. You think. “I’ll probably finish up for today now and just toss this one, or something. Gonna be useless as fuck in a little while, anyways, so might as well just quit while I’m ahead.” You toss the hilt from hand to hand, the starlight from outside glinting off the blunted edge. “You know?”

Karkat nods, humming a little under his breath. You can feel his gaze go straight through you.

“What’s up?” You rest the sword against the dummy and walk over to him, tossing yourself down on the bench beside him, knees bumping together. “You all good, dude?”

For a long, painfully long moment, he just sits there, staring down at his hands like they’re the most fascinating things on the face of the goddamn meteor. You can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s thinking, thinking long and hard about what e;s about to say next. Honestly, him doing that always scares the shit out of you; if there’s anything that’s guaranteed to make you feel worse than a Karkat who’s talking off the top of his head just to get under your skin, it’s a Karkat who’s putting every once of brain power he has behind choosing what he wants to say next.

Not because it;’s going to hurt—at least not by intention—but because whatever it is, it’s probably going to be just a little too real.

“Karkat—”

“How long are you going to fight for?” he asks suddenly, voice snapping to life, and you get the sick, awful feeling in the pit of your stomach that he isn’t just talking about sparring here.

You open your mouth to respond, find absolutely nothing to say that makes even the vaguest amount of sense, and close it with a snap.

Karkat keeps looking down at his hands. “I don’t—” He cuts himself off, frowning, biting the edge of his lip for a second. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to, you know. If it’s an issue about—fuck, I don’t know, _proving yourself_ to me, or to someone else on the meteor, or to yourself, Dave, I—”

He shakes his head. You feel inexplicably like you are about to be sick, and you aren't entirely sure why. 

“You don’t have to.” Karkat blinks. “Prove yourself, I mean. With this. With—with literally anything.”

The sick feeling gets worse. You realize you’re holding your breath and make a conscious effort to release it in the most normal-sounding way possible.

“You don’t have to prove yourself,” Karkat repeats. “And you don’t have to keep fighting. Not if you don’t want to.”

You think about Texas, about the strifes, about your bro leaving notes on the fridge every goddamn day heralding the start of another Dave Strider epic beatdown session. You think about your constant attempts at warding off Rose’s questions about how much you had eaten that day, or Egbert’s pleads for you to ask your bro if he could come spend a week with you over the summer. You think about the broken noses and black eyes and concussions, the scars on your chest that had made Karkat suck in a breath the first time he had seen you without your shirt off. You think about Jack and the sword and the blood on the ground, red on blue, the dizzying patterns etched into the backs of your eyes until the day you die. 

The fight, it seems, has been ongoing. You’re not sure at what point it ends.

And you could try and articulate this—really, you could—but he wouldn’t get it, not in the way you wanted him to. Or he would, completely and utterly so, because he’s Karkat fucking Vantas and _getting it_ is a thing he’s so weirdly good at doing with you sometimes. 

And you're honestly not sure which one is worse.

You drop your head into his shoulder in silence. After a moment of pause, you feel his cheek rest against the top of your skull. His hand finds yours, and when you lace your fingers together, he squeezes, hard. 

***

You alchemize a baseball bat and keep it in your room, tucked under your pillow. Sometimes at night when you can’t sleep, you’ll roll onto your back and pull the thing out

Karkat asks you about it one day in the strangely tactful way he’s started approaching these things. _What’s with that thing,_ he demanded, flapping a hand in the direction of the handle poking out from behind your pillows. _Some sort of demented human teddy bear?_

 _A bat,_ you had said, suddenly feeling indescribably small and stupid, like you’d just been outed as someone who still sleeps with a nightlight or sucks their thumb—and, really, isn’t a bat under your pillow just your own fucked-up manifestation of those things?—even as Karkat looked up at you, face completely devoid of judgement. _You know, for, like, baseball and shit._

_You’re going to play baseball? With who? Fucking Terezi?_

_The baseball was an example, dumbass._

_Okay, so why do you have it?_

Cue the obligatory pause in the dialogue. Sometimes some questions are harder to answer than others, especially when he looks at you like that, like he already knows all the answers.

You sleep with a bat under your pillow because sometimes you have moments where you are entirely convinced that your bro is going to come back. He is going to come back and bust down your door, katana already in hand, and you are going to need something to defend yourself with, because all your swords and shitty and break after two blows and you know for a fucking fact that if your bro ever comes back _—when_ , sometimes you can't help but think, _when your bro comes back_ —he will not hold back in the fucking slightest, so you really, really need something to protect yourself with, and what better than a bat?

What better than a fucking bat?

_I don’t know, dude, what if that creepy ass clown comes knocking? I don’t think it’d count as a heroic one, but death by getting my brains bashed out of my skull by a bowling pin-wielding whackjob like him doesn't exactly sound all that fun, either._

It’s comforting to know—the way that slamming into the ground after falling a hundred feet might be considered comforting—that there will always be repeated motifs in your life. Heat. Broken shitty swords. Baseball bats.

_That’s moronic._

_Fine, well, if the clown goes after your ass, you better not start knocking on my door begging for help._

After a while, you start having nightmares again. They start the same as the ones you had when you were a kid—you in the center of your room, you in the hallway, you hovering over your bro’s bed, your newly minted title of judge, jury, and executioner immortalized in the form of the bat you’ve been white-knuckling the whole time—except this time, you go through with it. You bring the bat crashing down onto his face and blood sprays everywhere, staining your face, your hands, your shirt, the floor, the bedsheets—everything—and a part of you can't help but think _no, this is wrong, this is too much blood, there’s too much blood here._ But even then, it doesn’t matter, because you are hollow and cold from the inside out, your face slack, eyes shut as you hit him, over and over and fucking over again.

You kill him and don’t feel a single fucking thing.

You wake from one of the dreams in a cold sweat one night, cheeks damp, and it’s the final straw. You take the bat to an airlock at the very back of the meteor and shoot it out into the space around you, watching as it fades from view in just a few seconds, a tiny speck among the tapestry of planets and galaxies and dying stars surrounding you. 

The dreams don’t stop, but the vindication you get helps, just a little.

***

_“Li’l man,” he says, and just like that you know it’s bad, you know it’s one of those nights, the nights he wants to talk and talk and talk, staring straight through you all the while instead of letting you fuck off to your room like you always do, like you want to more than anything right now._

_“Li’l man,” he says again, words slurring together, accent blurring the lines between vowels and consonants until the only way you’re able to recognize the phrase he’s saying is because he’s said it to you a billion times before, because you have this script, this dialogue, this scene of the horror-comedy-box-office-fucking-failure that is your life. “D’you think you’d kill me?”_

_You sit at the kitchen table, dead silent, gaze on your hands. The tab of his beer pops like a gunshot. You count the knots in the wood and recite the state capitals you memorized in school the last time you went—four months and sixteen days ago, but who’s counting, really—and focus on the feeling of each individual atom of air entering and exiting your lungs._

_You do not engage, because that will never help. Neither will staying silent, but at least this way you don’t risk running your mouth into deeply fucking dangerous waters._

_“Do you?” your bro says again, the enunciation painful, a conscious effort on his part hat makes your stomach flip over and then harden. “If y’had the chance, wouldja?”_

_You shrug, and the motion feels like pulling teeth, harder than anything you’ve ever done in your life up until this point. The lights from overhead, the busted fluorescent bulbs he refuses to change even though they’re in danger of breaking any second, even though every single thing in this apartment is in danger of breaking twenty-four-fucking-seven, glints off your bro’s glasses and right into your eyes._

_“Couldja?”_

_The question hangs over your head like a dagger poised to drop. You don’t know what to say that will get you out of this, so you just say nothing._

_His stare makes your skin crawl. Some invisible pressure starts to build up in the pit of your stomach._

_After a while, he just sighs, pushing his chair back with a scrape that sets your teeth on edge, his face is ever the wall of impassiveness, ever inscrutable no matter how hard you try to read him, but you think you can see some disappointment written into the lines around his mouth, and it hits like a punch to the stomach._

_“Roof,” he says, voice gravelly, reverberating around the inside of your skull like an air horn blast. “Now.”_

_The pressure builds. You breath around it, air whistling through your teeth._

_“Now,” your bro says, and suddenly his tone is crystal clear, sharp as the kanata he’ll be holding to your neck in twenty minutes tops. “Get your ass up, little man.”_

_And you do. What other option has there ever been?_

***

“He brought me takeout sometimes.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“He taught me how to scratch. How to make music. How to take photos, and shit.”

“Doesn’t matter, Dave.”

Karkat’s palm is warm on the top of your head. The blankets you’ve buried your face in make it a little hard to breathe right, but that could be other things, too. Namely the constricting feeling working its way through your chest, wrapping around your rib-cage and squeezing until you have to spit your words out in order for them to make sense; blood onto the pavement, the Texas summer sun and the door at the top of the stairs and the scraped-up knees from the tarmac and the blood and the blood and the—

“It doesn’t matter.” Karkat’s voice cuts you off, a knife through butter, and you cling to it, allowing him to wrench you out of whatever you’re tumbling into, grab the collar of your shirt and hold you back from the edge even as the precipice below you crumbles away. “Even if he was nice to you, even if he sometimes did nice things for you—Dave, that shit doesn’t matter. You can’t let that be a justification for all the awful, awful fucking shit he did to you.” His fingers comb through your hair, tactility to a degree of sentimentality you’re unused to—from him, sort of, but more of just in general—but you don’t have it within you to convince yourself you hate it right now. “That’s not fair to yourself, Dave. That isn’t fucking fair to yourself.”

You swallow back something heavy; it drops into your stomach like a rock in a puddle. Your head spins. 

“Sometimes I don’t hate him.”

Above you, you hear Karkat inhale and hold it. 

“I want to.” You swallow again, the back of your throat dry, ashy, bitter. “I want to all the fucking time, but—”

Something inside your nose starts to burn. Karkat’s fingers shake just a little, just for a second, a split second.

“—but I—”

And maybe this is all you’ll ever be, a boy lying face-down on his boyfriend’s bed, talking about the brother who raised him and how he can’t make himself feel what he knows he should be feeling. Maybe you’ll forever be stuck here in this moment, hanging between certainties—your bro the hero, your bro the villain, your bro the dude who ruined your life so systematically, so persistently, so without even the vaguest regard for what he might actually be doing to you at any point in time—forever destined to float in the liminal space in between. 

Because isn’t that poetic, too. Aren’t you just so fucking poetic. 

“—I don’t know,” you finish, and it sounds lame even to you. You don’t even want to think about how embarrassing this probably is for Karkat to have to sit by and watch.

“Sorry,” you mutter. It’s half-assed, worlds less than the justification he deserves from you, but it’s the best you can come up with right now.

“You don’t have to say that,” Karkat murmurs, leaning down to press his lips to the crown of your skull.

The worst thing is he sounds like he believes it. Like he means it, too. You blink, hard, before realizing it doesn’t matter; Karkat can’t see your face right now, and even if he could, the only person that’s ever cared about you crying is a whole universe away, lying in a clearing somewhere with a sword sticking out of his chest, dead.

***

“I didn’t kill my bro.”

You’re sitting on the edge of one of the observation decks, legs dangling over the edge, feet swinging from side to side. Your fingers are locked loosely with Karkat’s; his grip tightens the second you start speaking, the second you say your bro’s name. 

The times you talk about him are few and far between, those that you will only bring him up yourself even less so. But, hey, when in Rome, or whatever.

“Yeah?” Karkat says, prompting. 

“Yeah.” You nod. “Jack skewered that motherfucker before I got there. Found him dead as a fucking doornail, like, hours after the fact.”

Karkat hums again. His thumb swipes over the ridge of your knuckles.

“I don’t really know how this makes me feel,” you say, slowly. Then, “I don’t really know how my bro makes me feel. I don’t know what to do about everything.”

“I think that’s okay,” Karkat says, just as slowly, and you’re both learning, aren’t you? “To not know, I mean. It’s a lot of shit to unpack.”

“I know. I don’t really know where to start with that, either.”

Karkat looks over at you for a second. “You can start with me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Always. I don’t think I have all the answers, or that I can even offer that good of advice sometimes, but I’m always here. I want to help.” He swallows. “I want to help you get better.”

You nod, head bobbing. Something feels like it’s opening up in your chest, but for the first time, it doesn’t hurt, not that much. “I want to get better, too, I think.”

Karkat smiles, the expression lighting his face up in a way that makes your heart flip over in your chest.

“Thanks,” you say, and it’s a poor summation of what you actually mean, but the look in Karkat’s eyes tells you he gets what you mean, truly.

And for right now, maybe that's enough.


End file.
